Spam: shoot the vendor

Monday, 6 September 2004, 3:20 PM EST

The influx of unsolicited commercial email (UCE or spam) into our inboxes is rapidly getting out of control. Any number of surveys will tell you it's increasing. For instance, recent data from well-known email security organisation MessageLabs suggests that spam accounts for over 75 percent of all email.

A recent report from Nucleus Research showed that employees of fortune-500 companies in the US are deluged with around 7500 spam messages per year, costing them over 3 percent of their productive time, inspite of the corporate filters in place.

Unfortunately, most corporations are forced to operate their spam filters in their least aggressive mode to ensure genuine emails are never falsely identified. You can thank recent hard-line corporate legislation such as Sarbanes-Oxley, Ca SB 1386 and HIPAA for this attitude. Missing an important email would be much more costly than manually deleting spam.

Spotlight

Microsoft Edge, the new browser in Windows 10, represents a significant increase in the security over Internet Explorer. However, there are also new potential threat vectors that arenít present in older versions.

35 percent of employees would sell information on company patents, financial records and customer credit card details if the price was right. This illustrates the growing importance for organizations to deploy data loss prevention strategies.

Sun Tzu's writings have been studied throughout the ages by professional militaries and can used to not only answer the question of whether or not we are in a cyberwar, but how one can fight a cyber-battle.

Infosec consultant Paul Moore came up with a working solution to thwart a type of behavioral profiling. The result is a Chrome extension called Keyboard Privacy, which prevents profiling of users by the way they type by randomizing the rate at which characters reach the DOM.